An executive order is nothing more than a memo. It does not have the force of law. This is just as DOA as inane attempts to override the 14th amendment with an executive order.

It's over.

3 not 34...

They have him on video damaging 34 computers, for "more than $400" each time over a three day period.

There has been $46,855 worth of damage over "years", which they suspect was also done by the same person.

If you need to do that to keep your slot then clearly we don't have too many PhDs - if we had too many PhDs there would be less competition.

And someone who is years into a phd program doesn't need to do anything like that to keep their "slot". There isn't an annual culling, the bottom X% aren't kicked out. The performance of one candidate doesn't impact the success of another candidate. You don't get a worse phd because someone else got a better one. There's competition to get in in the first place, but once in it makes no sense to sabotage other candidates. (at least in my experience with phd programs - which admittedly are not at Berkeley or even in the US).

It's a question of dying before producing offspring. The article shows that the majority will reach the average age of parenthood in society. That's all it takes.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

Heh. My daughter and I were having a conversation about that just last night. She is a mostly a big believer that there is no "great filter" per se. The answer for her to the question of why intelligent aliens have not reached us yet is that intelligent aliens have not reached us yet. Still she had to concede that, if intelligent aliens were simply holding out on reaching out to us, one probable reason, could pretty well be summed up in a specific example. That example was a specific politician whose identity will be left as an exercise to the reader (note that, if you come up with an example that is not the one she was thinking of, it is still probably a correct example, since really it's about how much the politics of our planet suck and what a poor reflection that is on humans as a species).

One interesting thing about it as well is that, even if the question of whether or not there is other life out there is actually truly no, there's a funny thing that happens if the question of "will we ever work out interstellar travel" turns out to be yes. Basically, if we manage to inhabit worlds beyond our solar system and it's a repeatable event, then eventually we get life all over the place and the universe still has billions of years left at least for that life to evolve into all sorts of things. So, basically panspermia.

I mean, one of the houses I grew up in we heated our living room with a fireplace, so... I think the actual concentration may matter some.

Yeah, but that's UV radiation. Most transparent materials are opaque to UVC, the most dangerous UV light. There are even plenty of transparent materials (such as typical window glass) that are opaque to UVB. So that's the most dangerous UV light blocked possibly without even any special filter materials. UVA can be blocked by some materials that are fully transparent to ordinary visible light. Otherwise, there are plenty of coatings that are still largely transparent that can block it. So, you can block basically all the harmful UV light with a roof that is otherwise fully transparent. Not that you necessarily even need your habitat to have a transparent roof in the human habitable areas, but that might be nice for various public areas or even atria in people's private quarters.

In any case, at the approximate 50 km altitude proposed, the total amount of solar irradiance is estimated to be similar to Earth. If it's higher to any significant degree, then habitat areas with transparent roofs just need more light filtering (possibly with transparent solar panels). As it is, they will probably need some sort of shuttering system such as an LCD system or similar to simulate night and maybe seasons for the comfort of the residents since the proposal is to keep the habitat always in sunlight. Too much sunlight can make people overstimulated and manic. For agricultural areas, obviously the light cycle and allowed UV levels would depend on the needs of the particular plants growing in any bay. For solar panels, you would expect coatings that protect against particular UV ranges that might damage them. Possibly the coatings could be fluorescent to convert UV to light usable by the panels, or the panels might be intrinsically fully UV hardy. The materials of the outside of the aerostat habitats would need to be UV hardy or coated with a UV protection layer and they would similarly need acid protection.

Ultimately, EM radiation either UV or visible seems like it would be a non-issue with some basic design precautions. So it is a consideration, but an easily solved one. The same applies for other forms of radiation from the sun. This would be at an altitude where the protection of the atmosphere above provides almost exactly the same protection as that of Earth. On Earth, at sea level, radiation from the sun and cosmic radiation pose basically zero threat (the threat from UV is many, many times greater) barring a massive burst from a supernova. On Venus, at that altitude, the radiation threat would be no greater than being at a high altitude city on Earth.

I just had to remind someone else of this: sarcasm tags are now mandatory on all sarcasm.

Not really. Despite the heat of re-entry, meteorites are generally cold when they hit the ground since they tend to keep cool through ablation and/or sheer thermal mass and the square/cube ratio. Sure, a lot of meteors are going to be sterilized as fiery bolides, but if you have a lump of rock left over after re-entry and it had life in it, it is highly likely to survive.

Right, but the thing about what you're saying is that it means that the $20+ million isn't a real operating cost for the craft. Canceling it therefore does not mean that you really save that money.

So you're saying that the cost of research on the data sent back by MAVEN is misleadingly folded into the "operating costs"?